Brain thefts boost attendance at tiny museum

Jan. 18, 2014
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Brains in jars at the Indiana Medical History Museum in Indianapolis. The recent thefts of similar items from the museumÔ??s collection has given a boost to the small museumÔ??s attendance. / The Indianapolis Star file photo

by Will Higgins, The Indianapolis Star

by Will Higgins, The Indianapolis Star

INDIANAPOLIS -- It's not a strategy any marketing director would devise, but the theft of human brains from an obscure but fascinating medical museum on Indianapolis' Westside has caused a small spike in attendance.

On Saturday, 10 people paid their $7 for the Indiana Medical History Museum's late-afternoon guided tour, compared with the usual two or three. The Saturday before it was the same, with three dozen people coming through the door instead of the usual handful. Those aren't exactly Matisse numbers (the Indianapolis Museum of Art lured in 10,000 people just last weekend with its display of the French artist's works), but at IMHM, where the advertising budget is zero, it's a boom.

"If there's an upside to this horrific event," said Mary Ellen Nottage, the museum's director and only paid employee, "then it's exactly this."

"With the work I've done on the old records," she said, "I feel like I've gotten to know these folks. And it's really hard to think of their remains treated like this."

They were mental patients at Indianapolis' long-shuttered asylum, Central State Hospital. Between the 1890s and 1940s, physicians autopsied about 2,000 of them (in exchange for free funerals) in an effort to learn more about mental illness. They removed hundreds of organs from the deceased, including their brains, and kept them preserved in formaldehyde, in jars, for study and also as teaching tools for local medical students.

David Charles, a 21-year-old Indianapolis man, was arrested Dec. 16 for stealing jars of specimens and selling them on eBay. He is accused of breaking into the museum several times in December. On one raid, Dec. 14, according to the probable cause affidavit, Charles took 60 jars of "human brain and tissue." He goes to court for a pre-trial conference Feb. 24.

It's unclear exactly how many items were stolen, but Nottage puts the number at around 300 pint-sized and quart-sized glass jars containing tissue from major organs, liver, kidney, brain. Nearly 120 jars have been recovered so far.

Police were tipped off by a man in San Diego who paid $600 (plus $70 shipping) for six jars of brains. After noticing museum labels on the containers, the buyer had second thoughts and called authorities, leading to a sting in a Dairy Queen parking lot that ended with Charles in police custody.

The museum is housed in the asylum's 120-year-old pathology building, an imposing, two-story brick structure with labs, an amphitheater for teaching and, of course, the autopsy room. Inside and out, it looks like it did back in the day, all wood paneling and glass display cases, and floors that creak. Central State Hospital stayed open until 1994 as a residential campus for people with mental illnesses, but the pathology lab closed in 1968. It became a museum the following year. It's privately funded, mostly by physicians and retired physicians.

"Some of our visitors come out of curiosity, and some out of horror," said Linda Goff, a health care administrator who volunteers at the museum as a tour guide. "I try to change their perspective: These were real people these brains belonged to. I focus on the efforts that were made here to make the lives of the mentally ill better."

Body snatching, or stealing dead bodies from cemeteries, mostly to sell to medical schools, was not uncommon in the days before teaching institutions could properly and legally procure cadavers.

The medical museum had an exhibit in 2010 called "The Resurrectionists: Body Snatching in Indiana," which recalled a string of grave robberies in Indianapolis in 1902. "Gang of Ghouls," the newspapers called the perpetrators, who were arrested along with several physicians.

The incident, said Nottage, led to the establishment of the Indiana State Anatomical Education Program and an orderly method for medical schools to get hold of dead bodies, necessary tools in the teaching of anatomy.

The body snatchers' "methodology," Nottage said, was "very sophisticated. There were organized gangs and they were very entrepreneurial - they knew what funerals were taking place and when. They knew where the head was positioned in the casket. They could dig a small hole, smash into the head end of the casket and then they used grappling hooks to bring the body out."

Antique body parts remain in demand. The San Diego man, after all, paid $600 for six jars of brains. And there are others like him.

The Science Channel's "Oddities" chronicles a New York antique shop's vibrant business in the moving of freaky merchandise, including human skulls and full skeletons (along with taxidermied armadillos and two-faced cats.) "This piece reminds me of a deformed pelvis I bought from you in 1989," says a customer in one episode.

The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 makes it "unlawful for any person to knowingly acquire, receive or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation if the transfer affects interstate commerce."

But just how that applies to the sale of historic specimens such as those stolen from the museum is unclear, said Sam Davis, director of professional services for Indiana Organ Procurement Organization. "The organs in this case were originally procured long before many of the current regulations," Davis noted. And obviously they'd no longer be transplantable.

Davis is against the use of antique body parts for interior design or for any entertainment. "The people who are buying them really shouldn't have body parts just because they think it's cool," he said.

"They need to be in the hands of people who are well-trained and whose processes have been reviewed," Davis said. "It's all about making sure the tissues are handled appropriately and with dignity."